What I Think - Chapter Two

Here are some of my favorite pictures of my oldest son who lives in California; he has two children, Raymond and Heather but unfortunately we don't see them very often. Infrequent pictures are about all we have of him and his family. But I can tell he loves his children and they are beautiful; obviously they've inherited his good genes!

What I think - Chapter Two:

Don't expect a remarkable story. I'm not remarkable and neither is my story, though I believe every person, every family has an interesting story, a history, worth telling. It's just that so few have the time, ability, or desire to tell it this way.

I have had my heart sliced in two. I have tasted the worst imaginable pain yet felt the fullest love, and experienced the greatest joy. That's what life is about. You measure the good against the bad and in the end we hope it's all worth it.

It is. I believe it is. And I hope you do too.

But who really cares that I am a mother of four, a wife? Who would take note? Nothing extraordinary in my life that makes me better-off, worse-off; That I live in a not-so-extraordinary house in a not-so-extraordinary city, that I go to work every day at a not-so-extraordinary job? I have no special story to tell, so don't read this believing my story will draw you in like a Stephen King novel. Instead, look for the parellels of my life and yours. What I've found is that everyone is very different, yet everyone is very much the same. My stories will echo similar to yours. My heartaches, my disappointments, my victories...all are much like everyone else's. Yet, I feel I have led an somewhat extraodrinary life as eveyone's is extraordinary--and I've enjoyed looking back and seeing how the course of my life has been embroidered, similar to a tapestry, with knots of bright colors, twisted yarns and course fabric. It is my landscape, as you have yours. Touch it, feel it.

For twenty years I have lived in this same, simple home; and twenty times I have seen the trees in my yard drop their leaves after their metamorphisis every autumn. I find comfort in that, counting my trees and watching their leaves die and fall every year, knowing they'll come back bright and green in the Spring. For now they litter our yard just as they do every year and my feet make crunching noises on them as I walk over them. Our nearly-bare tree branches, twisted blackly above me in the dusky light, make me think of not just winter here, but winter there, where the other, "winter-part" of my heart lives, in Minnesota. But for twenty years I have made this my home and I feel safe here, secure in the sameness. Prior to that, even during the first half of this 20 years I speak of, I did not feel safe and my life careened out of control, just as I think everyone's does, somewhere along the line. The zigs and zags of life!

After leaving Minnesota as a new 19 year old bride in 1980, I enjoyed some of the best 7 years of my life. (Though leaving my mother would be the hardest thing I'd done) I made a new life with myself with the "boy-next-door-sailor-out-of-the-Navy" that my parents were so worried about. They need not have been afraid. He was so good to me. He loved me purely and fully and I him. I never knew love until I met him and I never knew pain until I lost him. Oh, that fateful day in March of 1986 when my perfect china plate was broken into a million pieces! I could not imagine that it could and would get even far worse? But I won't write of those lost years now. They were the darkest days of my life and I don't care to dig them up now in order to show you something decomposed and ugly. It is gone and best left buried where it belongs. It's my "compost". It was the time between Raymond and Richard. Anyone that knows me and knows me well, understands that already without my saying more. The distance between these two points are best left to drift away, like dandelion seeds in the wind.

Fast forward to present day, I am wife to Richard. Mother to Catherine and Michael, Kimberly and Joey. Grandmother to Mya Ray, Joseph Ray and Heather. It is a good life and I am content; I have much to be thankful for!

I am blessed with a truly wonderful, deeply intense and powerful friendship that is foremost in my heart. (My life-friend, my half-sister/half-twin Rebecca) I have many secondary friendships that are also truly valuable to me though they garner less of my attention, less of my heart.
It is an easy kinship with Rebecca and I and we are bound as sisters; I love her as a sister and want to grow old in her friendship. My marriage isn't always as easy, much as I love Richard our souls don't speak as mine and my girlfriend's do. It is the marital relationship in which the changing pattern of my life disrupts; yet those same changes in pattern of my life bind my girlfriends's love as she understands and accepts it in a way no one else can. Both relationships are beautiful and sacred to me. Their self enclosed perfection wears the freshness of a Spring morning.

It is true, of course, that both original relationships are very beautiful, like a shell. Like two different shells, unique and individual in themselves. Forgetting about the summer to come, one often feels one would like to prolong the spring of early love, when two people stand as individuals, without past or future, facing each other. One resents any change, even though one knows that transformation is natural and part of the process of life and its evolution. Like its parellel in physical passion, the early, ecstatic stage of a relationship cannot continue always at the same pitch of intensity. It moves to another phase of growth which one should not dread, but welcome as one welcomes Summer after Spring. There can also be a dead weight accumulation, a coating of false values, habits, and burdens which blights life. It is this smothering coat that needs constantly to be stripped off, in life as well as in relationships.

Certainly, one has the illusion that one will find oneself in being loved for what one really is, not for a collection of functions. but can one actually find oneself in someone else? In someone else's love? Or even in the mirror someone else holds up for me? I belive true identity is found by going into one's own ground and knowing oneself. It is found when one loses oneself, paradoxically. There I can refine my strength, the strength I need for this second half of my life.

What I Think - Chapter One

I've been doing a bit of note taking, scribbling, rambling of words on paper really but with the hope to put some thoughtful, provoking words here for you, my reader. I have always wanted to write and I've always lamented the lack of time to do so. I often wonder what I'd be able to do if I devoted a considerable amount of time to it instead of giving it less time than moisterizing my face every day. Writing consists of 10% stabbing out letters and words on paper or keyboard, and 90% deep thought, pure open mindess to any perspective. It's the blood-sweat-and tears and the joy-love-fullness of what I'm living. I do an awful lot of reading. I have calculated that I have read perhaps 10,000 books so far in my lifetime. I've been reading non-stop since First Grade, through "See Jane Run" primers to Nancy Drew, Laura Ingalls, Danielle Steele, to John Steinbeck, Whitman, Hemingway and Tolstoy. My reading is becoming mature, just as I am. But I've loved my books perhaps more than so many other things in life. Perhaps more than is appropriate, but it is a part of me. Of course I love my family, my children, birds, flowers, peace and tranquility, the sound of the creek over cold rocks or the leaves blowing in the wind...I love all these things but there is a part of me that no one intrudes, and that is my reading self. For that is one thing I do for me, always have and always will. I love the written word, I love it more when it tells a good story. And that's what I hope to do, write my story.

This will be my gift to you, my reader. A gift for my mother and my father, brothers and sisters, husband, children and dear friends.... for their continual love, the very foundation of my life. Looking back many years to my first memory of "family", "we" were once a group of 8 living individuals--4 female, 4 male; together under one roof long ago, now we are 7 families living in 7 places. My heart still aches sometimes for those few precious years we 8 had together before we split forever to continue the next generation. I like remembering some of those days, hoping to bring the good parts into my family now, instilling some of those values, disgarding others to make our own way.

And we all have. Oh, yes we all know love is painful. The pain of distance, of years and miles. The pain of things said, and the pain of things left unsaid. But we can't live without love, good and bad, beautiful and sad.

One place I can go, besides retreating into my books is, not surprising, alone in the stillness of the outdoors. Perhaps I'm in my kayak, paddle resting, body still, ears perked while drifting in a salt marsh or skimming through tall brown and golden-green reeds in the winding creek. Or standing completely still in the woods in the dead of winter and hearing only silence for miles, so quiet you might hear snowflakes fall past your cheek....I like to sit on a big rock overlooking a bay at sunset. I like the solitary sound of my footprints in the dry, fall leaves. I like seeing my breath smoke out of my mouth on a crispy autumn day. In this, I feel a real kinship with my brothers, they are like this as well. And it is at the these times that I can really feel who I am, and the words come freely.

One of my favorite places is the beach is right here in north Florida. We are fortunate to have white sugar beaches that are relatively private and undamaged by modern times; fragile and beautiful, it's where I am at peace. Our first day at our beachhouse every summer usually involves going down our deck and steps that take us directly to the shore first thing in the morning, loaded up with skin protectant, books, magazines, umbrella, drink, sandles, towel...but the best way is simply to leave with nothing and just walk. I'm tempted often to spend my time taking countless pictures but realized I was missing the most glorious sunsets and the peaceful arcs the birds made through the sky while I was busy focusing lenses and switching equipment. Yes, the beach is best enjoyed simply and empty-handed. Only then can I hear the flapping of the osprey wings, the thunderous roar of the waves, the call of the lone gull.

Too often I'm bending down to pick up this treasure or that washed up on shore. I can hardly bear to walk along the tide's edge and NOT look for that piece of turquoise sea glass, or the perfect whelk, the most unusual piece of driftwood. I do enjoy picking them up still and looking at them, touching them and really feeling their surfaces. But now for the most part I'm okay putting a lot of those treasures back down and walking on. I take only the finest pieces. I want to walk without searching, without a care. I search instead for harmony, essentially spiritual, I believe. I want a singleness of eye, a purity of intention. I mean to live a simple life, to choose a simple shell, like that whelk I fingered in my hand...a shell I can carry easily; but I find that my frame of life does not foster simplicity. My husband and children must make their way in the world and I have other fiscal responsibilities as well. Instead, what a circus act I find myself performing so often! This is not simplicity but multiplicity! Sometimes I feel it does not bring me grace but that the constancy of it is killing my soul.

I like to watch the sly Willet, nesting in the ragged tide-wash behind me; the Sandpiper, running in little unfrightened steps down the shining beach ahead of me, and an old Gull, hunched up, grouchy, surveying the horizon. And I feel a kinship with them too.

Now that's peace.

More photos!

As an avid reader I wanted to share one of my favorite websites. It's calledwww.whatshouldireadnext.com. All you do is type in one of your favorite books and viola--it's lists other books that you'll probably like too!

I've spent the better part of the last 2 1 /2 days in bed with a horrible cold, body aches and an ear infection. We just had our 4 coldest days of the winter, so I guess it was a good time to stay warm in bed and not worry about much else. I read a couple books in between naps. Just finished The Thirteenth Tale and now I'm moving on to the next 10 or 15 books I recently purchaed or checked out from the library. Well, that's ONE good thing a good few sicks days will afford me....more time to read my devoted books. Though I think I'm ready to start moving about by tomorrow. (Sneeze, hack, cough..) well at least I hope so. G'day y'all!

February update

Hey ya'll! I wanted to post one of my favorite recent pictures--of course, it's another bird! Sure wish I could quit my day job and take off with bike and camera all day every day. I'd love nothing better than to wander through the woods or meander along the beach, admiring nature and birds...on the ground, in the trees, soaring through the sky. Catherine turned 6 and I'm posting her birthday picture too. I'm going to be updating my blog to make it easier for you to add comments and I'm going to add links to some of my favorite websites. In addition, please keep in mind that if you double click on any of my pics, you'll get a larger version suitable for printing.

Take care, 'till next time ya'll!